Topic: pizza website

Last night my daughter had a friend over which means pizza for dinner. (Don’t all of you try to be my daughter’s friend at once now.)

I have a routine. I usually go online to compare several pizza places we like and buy the deal that fits best. I start with Hungry Howies Pizza.

They used to have coupons that were very easy to find. However, this time they wasted my time and I bought a pizza from a competitor after getting frustrated with their website. This is why you need to really look at how people use your website. I can imagine that their online marketer is pleased. The site looks nice enough and now it has the feature all the franchisees probably were asking for. Different coupons by store.

Here is the problem – and it is costing them money – and you may be doing a similar mistakes.

They’d taught me where to go in the past for online coupons. After I have done it once or twice, I have no need to read the text on the page, I just click and find them. It is very unpleasant to need to figure things out after you already learned it once.

They falsely promise coupons many times – leading me through a maze that never did produce a coupon. I was told to “Click the coupon below” and it was blank. They are time thieves! I just want to save a dollar on a pizza and precious minutes of my life were slipping away.

They present pretend coupons – things that look like they will lead to coupons but do not produce any.

I did some quick screen shots below so you can see what I mean. I do not want to bash Hungry Howies Pizza, but I think writing something like this illustrates what you might be doing wrong on your website as well. And maybe Hungry Howies marketing Team will visit and get some free consulting as well.

Twice now I have gone to their site and not been able to find coupons. The first time I gave up really fast and ordered somewhere else, the second time I hunted more, gave up and ordered from somewhere else.

I know that we can argue that if I loved their pizza I would not worry about it. But pizza is a commodity and I do not order it frequently and I do not have a favorite. If they have lost 2 orders from me in the last 3 months, how many are they loosing all together? They may be blaming a bad economy for something that has more to do with a bad website.